A Mount Desert Island nonprofit will receive $308,000 in state funding for an ongoing restoration project at Acadia National Park’s largest freshwater wetland.
The grant awarded to Friends of Acadia will help address damage already caused by climate change at Great Meadow, and will help prepare Acadia National Park for a host of future climate-driven impacts: among them, intense rainfall, harsh droughts, rising sea levels and fewer native plants.
“This restoration work is an effort to support the hydrology, or water flow, of the wetland,” Friends of Acadia spokesperson Perrin Doniger said. “Particularly as Acadia experiences more frequent and intense storms and heavy rains in winter instead of snow.”
The Maine Natural Resource Conservation Program awarded more than $4.6 million to 10 projects, one of which is led by Friends of Acadia, to support freshwater and coastal wetland restoration, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.
The Gulf of Maine, which surrounds Acadia, is among the fastest warming sections of ocean in the world: in just the past century, temperatures have risen 3 degrees Fahrenheit. The gulf’s summer warming rate is three times the global ocean average, according to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.
The ever-warming gulf directly impacts Acadia’s freshwater wetlands like the Great Meadow: heavier rainfall, coastal flooding and tidal surging all stress the park’s connected ecosystems.
Friends of Acadia, a nonprofit advocacy and conservation organization, has worked with the park, the Schoodic Institute and Wabanaki communities on the restoration project.
The funding will be used to expand the ongoing restoration project on watershed areas, a hydrologic region where all water drains to a single outlet, above and below the 116-acre Great Meadow, with the intention of sustaining a healthier wetland habitat, Doniger said.
The multi-part project will restore the historic Abbe Stream to a more natural streambed, connecting it directly to Cromwell Brook’s floodplain and diverting it from a “maze of infrastructure,” Lauren Gibson, the project’s Friends of Acadia coordinator, said. Cromwell Brook is the main waterway that passes through the Great Meadow.
These efforts improve plant and wildlife habitat conditions and rehabilitate native vegetation, Doniger said.
The project isn’t intended to “eliminate flooding altogether, just the duration of flooding,” Gibson said. As the stream flows currently, flooding limits trail accessibility during large storm events.
Friends of Acadia originally requested $164,000 but later revised that amount after a budget adjustment, Dawn Hallowell, director of the southern regional office for the state’s environmental protection department, said.
The timeline for the grant’s disbursement has not been finalized, Doniger said.
MNRCP, a cooperative program between Maine DEP and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is administered by The Nature Conservancy. The program has awarded more than $36 million to public and private partners for wetland preservation projects since its 2008 inception, according to the DEP.
The MNRCP’s $4.6 million grant will also support nine other projects: the restoration of the salt marsh at York River and eelgrass in Great Salt Bay, the removal of the dams on rivers in Yarmouth and Buckfield and the expansion of the riparian buffer of a Waldoboro brook, among several other projects, according to the DEP.
